February 06, 2006

Special Effects (1984): B

With Vertigo and Peeping Tom as his most obvious (but far from only) touchstones, Larry Cohen dives headfirst into meta territory with Special Effects, a self-reflexive thriller that deliriously dissects the boundaries between reality and fiction. With his career in shambles after having blown a $30 million special effects-laden project, director Christopher Neville (Eric Bogosian, in his screen debut) finds inspiration for a comeback after he murders a young would-be starlet named Andrea (Ms. 45’s Zoë Lund), films the dirty deed, and then blackmails the victim’s Arkansas-hailing husband (and baby’s daddy) Keefe (Perfect Strangers’ Brad Rijn) – detective Delroy’s (Keevin O’Connor) prime suspect in the slaying – to star in a reality-based film about the murder starring an Andrea doppelganger named Elaine (also Lund) with whom Keefe begins falling in love. It’s an insane set-up to be sure, and Cohen never seems fully in control of the myriad themes he’s addressing. But nonetheless, the whiplash combination of technical coarseness, tongue-in-cheek allusions, Day for Night-style in-jokes, and Bogosian’s presence as a mordantly villainous filmmaker (an obvious stand-in for Cohen himself) nonetheless makes Special Effects a significant (if ultimately chaotic) entry in the director’s canon of ramshackle tributes to the dark, dangerous, voyeuristic allure of the cinema.